Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a work-in-progress study that aims to supplement the understanding of global and regional game cultures and industries by looking at the transmedia franchises in which East-Asian free-to-play games are developed and released.

Paper long abstract:

The globally successful free-to-play (F2P) mobile games Genshin Impact (HoYoverse 2020), Honor of Kings (TiMi Studio Group 2015), and Fate/Grand Order (Lasengle 2015) show that F2P games from the East-Asian region occupy a vital spot in the media consumption of everyday life (Chapple 2022). In light of the theme ‘Media in Relation’, this paper presents a work-in-progress study that aims to supplement the understanding of global and regional game cultures and industries by looking at the transmedia franchises in which East-Asian F2P games are developed and released. While F2P games from North American and Western European game industries are usually associated with lootboxes, random boxes that offer players items from a large pool of items (Holmes et al. 2017), F2P games from the East-Asian region (i.e., China, South Korea, and Japan) use a gacha mechanic, which incentives players to accumulate or buy resources in the game to obtain a randomized item or character (Woods 2022), and are therefore also known as ‘gacha games’.

The paper will particularly focus on the role of Japanese gacha games within larger transmedia franchises and their influence on digital games from and in East-Asia. According to Hartzheim (2019), licensed mobile games from Japan function to amplify existing larger franchises. They advertise the core texts to various audiences and actively stimulate player consumption for both in-game and products within the larger franchise (234). This paper will supplement this argument by demonstrating that gacha games have gradually become the primary text on to which surrounding franchises are based. Through a close reading of several gacha games, like Genshin Impact, and Disney Twisted Wonderland (f4samurai 2020), this paper engages with the issue that as gacha games become the centre of transmedia franchises, there is an increasing risk of exploitative immaterial labour of players across the franchises, which is common for the overall predatory trend of digital capitalism in which users are constantly monitored.